My huge problems in upgrading to Panther

[Steve Goldstein]

I got Panther yesterday after a colleague waxed eloquent about it and 
tole me that is was the easiest upgrade that he had ever encountered. 
So, I just popped the CD in the drive and upgraded my main drive. 
CRASH...TINKLE...BURN ...

Panther started up OK, but then when little doo-dads that I had 
installed in Jaguar started prancing across the menu bar, the menu 
bar started to go crazy, and then so did the Finder, as if it was 
crashing and trying to re-start itself, until most everything 
disappeared from the Desktop, and the machine was unusable.  I had 
three important Firewire 400 drives attached at the time, most with 
bootable Jaguar partitions of various vintage (10.2.6, 10.2.8) in 
them, so I   tried to boot with them.  But, all of them, though they 
booted, threw kernel panics a few minutes after booting up.  ALL of 
them!

Somehow, I managed to get back into the Panther disk and log out and 
then log back in as root.  It was blissfully calm and beautiful, like 
the eye of a hurricane.  I could even run Eudora there, whereas in 
the other partitions, Eudora kept freezing with error messages.  I 
created yet another user account and tried to use that, and it was 
OK, except that Eudora kept throwing the error messages there, too. 
I ran Disk Warrior on ALL partitions, and this morning managed to 
start up the regular user account in Panther, but with SHIFT held 
down to shut off all the startup applications.  Then, I went into the 
replacement for Login Items in the System Preferences 
(Accounts->Startup Items) and shut off EVERYTHING, and then logged 
out and re-entered the account, and all worked, including Eudora.  I 
haven't had the time yet to try booting with the other Jaguar 
partitions.

Here's some advice, unrefined and maybe overkill until I can test 
things out, but better cautions than sorry like me; before upgrading, 
first:

Disconnect all attached drives

Turn off all startup applications and all haxies in the System 
Preferences window.

Cheers,

Steve